Fcukers Get the Crowd Grooving Hard at Portola 2026

Fcukers make dance music with a pleasantly grubby streak. The basslines are thick, the hooks are economical, and Shanny Wise sings as though she has better things to do than convince you to have a good time. At Portola, that attitude suited the surroundings. On an industrial pier where the attractions were mostly other stages, their Saturday set offered an appealingly direct proposition: get into the groove and stay there.

The New York duo of Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis arrived with a much larger repertoire than the handful of singles that first made their name. This year's debut album, Ö, supplied much of the set, with “Beatback,” “L.U.C.K.Y,” “Butterflies” and “Play Me” appearing alongside material from the Baggy$$ EP. The expanded catalog matters for a group whose early appeal was so immediate. A good bassline can introduce a band; sustaining that attraction across a festival slot takes more than one.

Their best trick is the way Wise's cool delivery sits against music that is constantly nudging you to move. She leaves space around the phrases, allowing the rhythm to supply the insistence. The band's affection for house, trip-hop, and big beat is easy to hear, but those influences work best as ingredients in short, sticky songs. On “I Like It Like That,” the vocal hardly needs to say anything. The bassline has already made the invitation.

There is an obvious risk in this music. Understatement can become sameness, and a vocal manner that sounds effortlessly cool on one track can feel limiting across several. Fcukers have enough rhythmic variety, and enough good hooks, to make that a productive tension. The charm lies in how casually they wear songs that are clearly built to get lodged in your head. “Homie Don't Shake” and “Bon Bon,” both part of the set, remain particularly good demonstrations of that talent.

The response afterward was appropriately uncomplicated. A thread on the Portola subreddit was titled “Fcukers was super fun,” which gets closer to their appeal than a lengthy argument about the return of indie sleaze. There is history in the sound, certainly, but the immediate pleasure is hearing those references turned into something you can dance to without studying the provenance.

On a Saturday that also included established names with decades of records behind them, Fcukers brought a welcome streak of youthful irreverence. Their songs have the scale of a good club single rather than an arena anthem, and that is part of what makes them work. Portola gave them a bigger space without requiring them to sand away the rough edges.

Article by: Andrew Ameter

Photos by: AJ Manalaysay, Demian Beccara, Priscilla Rodriguez, & Sabrina Poei